Iowa to receive grant money for EHR implementation

Iowa has become the first state in the nation to have its Medicaid program chosen to receive funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to assess implementation of electronic health records and personal health records.

Iowa’s Medicaid program will receive a grant of $1.16 million in federal matching funds through the CMS, which is awarding grants to states to assess EHR readiness and awareness among their Medicaid providers. The money will go toward activities to plan for the adoption of EHRs, including efforts to promote interoperability and “meaningful use” of the records and identifying barriers to adoption. The stimulus law provides 90% of the funds needed to administer the grants to providers, including auditing.

The grant funding will also go toward assessing expectations for PHR technology. Unlike EHRs, which are maintained by providers, PHRs are managed directly by the consumer.

“While Iowa is the first state to receive approval of its plan for implementing the recovery act’s EHR incentive program, a number of other states have submitted plans as well,” said Cindy Mann, director of the CMS’ Center for Medicaid and State Operations, in a news release.

CMS to test receiving quality data from electronic health records

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to test its ability to accept selected clinical quality data directly from hospital electronic health record systems as early as July 2010.

CMS said it would seek volunteer hospitals to report stroke, blood clot and emergency department measures of care via EHR systems as part of the Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payment Update program, which provides higher Medicare payments to hospitals that report quality measures to the agency.

The agency detailed the plans in the Aug. 27 Federal Register in announcing changes to its rule for the Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payments Update. The program, a provision of 2003’s Medicare prescription drug legislation, required hospitals by 2010 to report on 42 quality measures to receive additional incentive payments.

Reporting to CMS is generally paper-based or through a mix of manual and automated systems.

Participating hospitals and their vendors will have to be able to transmit clinical EHR data that adhere to interoperability standards, such as cross document sharing, cross community access, clinical data architecture and Health Level 7 version 3, CMS said.

CMS has encouraged hospitals to adopt EHRs that can report quality data directly to a CMS data repository. Ideally, the use of EHR systems would improve the quality of care by providing physicians with pertinent clinical data as they were treating patients.

“The testing of EHR submission is an important and necessary step to establish the ability of EHRs to report clinical quality measures and the capacity of CMS to receive such data,” the agency said in the published interim rule.

The reporting of selected quality measures is also a key provision of the stimulus law. The Health IT Policy Committee, led by Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health IT, has recommended that quality reporting be a part of the criteria providers must meet to demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health record systems, CMS said.